Slide Show: Classic Advertisements

To celebrate this week’s release of “The 40s: The Story of a Decade,” an anthology of New Yorker articles, stories, and poems, we’re highlighting visual material from the magazine’s archives.

The New Yorker’s advertisements have always been a reflection of the times. The ads that ran during the pivotal decade of the nineteen-forties are no different. While some examples in the slide show below, such as a perfume promotion with parachuting fragrance bottles, retain the light wit of The New Yorker’s early years, many of them display a sombre and civic-minded tone. (This was also true of the editorial perspective toward advertisements at the time. As Thomas Kunkel notes, in his 2001 book “Letters from the Editor,” Harold Ross, the founding editor of The New Yorker, banned ads for popular hotels or clubs that excluded Jews in 1942.) Altogether, the ads from the forties reflect a growing awareness of America’s role in the world and a young publication’s coming of age.